These are all very old problems brought up when workers want protection from abusive employers by forming a union and is not unique to the video games industry at all.
Even railroads and textile mills didn’t ask their employees to work 80 hour work weeks.
There are some serious bad actors in the game industry, Rock Star being one of the worst.
Where I've worked we valued work/life balance as much as possible. Did we have a bit of crunch close to a release? Yep, but it was short and a few weeks at max. Most of us enjoyed it due to the extra camaraderie.
If there were a unionization effort that focused on 1) a hard 40-50 hour cap on work hours (or with paid overtime) and 2) enforced profit sharing plans, I could support it.
The current main unionization effort basically says "things will be better for everyone" on their FAQ. Total bullshit.
Saying that 'most of us enjoyed crunch time' seems like a bit of projection, especially for people that might have families or other social obligations outside of work that crunch time eats into.
Just so you know, this is the knife edge that leads you down to crunch.
Literally every time I had a 3-4mo 80-100hour crunch it always started out with "we're going to push for a week or two" which just transitioned into "just one more week" for the next 3 months.
Also, shame for celebrating a crunch. You may have enjoyed it but there's a high likelyhood someone else went along just to not "rock the boat". I don't care who you are putting in more hours puts stress on other parts of your life.
I just don't understand how that industry has their head up their ass from top to bottom for such a long time. There's some interesting problems in that space but after my 6 years I'd never go back.
Shame for celebrating a crunch? I'm talking 50 hours a week instead of 40 for a period of a few weeks. It is possible for a company and project to need that extra work and not turn into a sweatshop afterwards. I am 100% against the crunch that is par for the course in so many studios, but I am also disappointed by an attitude that work is always just work and god forbid it ever intrude on life outside.
I worked for five years at early and late stage startups before transitioning to games, and I cannot recall there ever being a time when extra work was not needed to get over the finish line.
If a union ends up being the only way chronic overwork can be addressed in the industry at large, so be it. Perhaps the real solution though is a legislative one, as suggested below.
> I worked for five years at early and late stage startups before transitioning to games, and I cannot recall there ever being a time when extra work was not needed to get over the finish line.
I worked at such company too. It had zero to do with need for overtime and and a lot to do with people wanting to work this way. E.g. unwillingness to prioritize, unwillingness to negotiate, wish to be seen like the one who stays late and thus finding work to stay late when not needed. Overtime is not seen as failure of organization, so the organization does not learn how to do it. People staying late are seen as heros and people managing projects so that overtime is not needed are not rewarded, so latter leave and former create culture.
To large extend, people who stay in such companies don't believe it is possible to make deadline without overtime, so they are not even trying.
It's trivial to never have overtime if you either 1) have no deadlines or 2) have a project so unoriginal you can plan its schedule to the hour.
Show me any project with dynamic requirements that has some sort of deadline, be it time or money running out, and I guarantee there has been some extra work at some point.
I am not saying it is trivial. I am saying it is not rewarded. It takes skill and willingness and some companies are not motivated to do it. Nevertheless, it is quite possible to not cruck when you decide you don't do that, period.
Prioritization, negotiation and saying no. Estimates large enough that they have buffers. You don't need on hour predictability. It is precisely when you have dynamic requirements when you are supposed to use tools like that.
After crunch, there are typically many bugs and convoluted code. It just adds to overall time in long term. Pretty much all studies found crunch to not be effective. It is not about achieving more.
> but I am also disappointed by an attitude that work is always just work and god forbid it ever intrude on life outside.
Fuck yeah it's "just work".
I want my employees and coworkers to be happy, healthy and well actualized so that when they're at work they're focused and giving it 100%. Plenty of hard business data there shows that when you make sure someone's time outside of work is well respected they'll perform much better on the job.
Burnout and turnover can have a brutal impact on an company/organization's ability to execute, the list goes on. You're also self-selecting for a workforce that has the flexibility, which means your viewpoint is a lot less diverse.
This is the same crunch bullshit I got fed before in that industry.
Yup, but that's a place of privilege that lets you do that.
What if you were a single dad?
What if you had an elder family member to take care of?
What if you were living paycheck to paycheck and had a second job to be able to make rent?
I've found some of the best teams I was on had a diverse set of people who bring their unique perspectives into the fold. Otherwise you could end up with a racist soap dispenser[1].
You can imagine me to be as privileged as you wish if it helps your argument.
> What if you were a single dad?
> What if you had an elder family member to take care of?
As I mentioned above, family takes priority. If your team is so immature that they feel resentful when another member can't work those two extra hours a day because their Dad is sick, you've got another set of problems.
> What if you were living paycheck to paycheck and had a second job to be able to make rent?
This is a bit of a stretch. We are limiting the scope of our discussion to workers in the game industry. If you need two jobs to make rent in this scenario, find a way to cut expenses.
Yeah, but how many people do you work with that have those types of commitments? How many people didn't participate in that crunch at all?
I'll hazard that the answer is low, because the industry self-selects for people who are willing to take abuse for 'prestige'. They take pride in it, just the same way you did.
> This is a bit of a stretch. We are limiting the scope of our discussion to workers in the game industry.
Yes, yes we are. My first job in the industry was $35k/hr as a dev and I've seen worse salaries for design or art.
Let me pose a question to you. How would you live in Seattle, on $35k/yr in a way that one accident/major expense wouldn't put you in a situation where you're living paycheck to paycheck? Keep in mind an average 1br apartment is ~$1800/mo[1] so you're going to be well over 50% income : housing ratio.
For that reason you have people who work second jobs or have other commitments to be able to make their rent.
Let me reiterate, I am not advocating crunch. I am saying that it is a reasonable expectation for a high performing salaried position that a few weeks of extra hours over the course of a year is completely reasonable.
And $35k for a dev job? When was this, and if it was anytime even remotely recent why on earth did you accept? A new QA hire at my last job would've made more than that.
You don't live in Seattle proper if you are making $35k. Live in a suburb on the line. Don't have a car payment if you can avoid it. And to pull that income : housing ratio down get roommates. I have done this.
And frankly this is a pretty silly argument to make in a discussion around why game developers should unionize.
Family obligations are quite clearly not taking priority when you are crunching. By necessity, the partner is doing all household and kids related work at that time. Obviously missed deadlines happen outside game development too and the partner is likely to have period where she/he has more work to do too and the other one takes it.
But crunch is normally defined as sustained overtime - articles I seen it require it to be over 6 weeks. So it is quite a lot of time.
Yea exactly. The difference between crunch and extra work to hit a deadline is entirely one of frequency and duration. My wife couldn't work in a more different industry than I do, but she is also subject to the occasional bout of extra work. We support each other and it's no issue.
If I wanted a predictable job that always has upfront hours, I suppose I could go back to making hourly minimum wage with zero benefits.
>If there were a unionization effort that focused on 1) a hard 40-50 hour cap on work hours (or with paid overtime) and 2) enforced profit sharing plans, I could support it.
>The current main unionization effort basically says "things will be better for everyone" on their FAQ. Total bullshit.
What is your familiarity with how a union works? An industry-wide unionization effort cannot effectively state what the future will hold.
When employees decide to try to organize a union within their company, they decide what the issues are. Their task is to convince their coworkers to join the union, so they will be focusing on the pain points unique to their own employment situation. Maybe in one company, it's crunch time, while in another, it's keeping a more consistent labor force despite project sizes changing wildly over time.
The new union will then negotiate a contract on behalf of its members. Each new union will be focusing on different things.
An industry-wide organizational effort that focuses on work hours and profit sharing would not catch the interest employees at a shop with good hours, good pay, but zero job protections and inadequate health coverage (for example).
Well my brother worked construction in the northeast where it is unionized, and it was an absolute nightmare for a variety of reasons. He was unable to work without a union card, getting that union card was very difficult without knowing someone because union jobs are highly coveted and thus kept artificially scarce, and once a member of the union he was forced to work with many lazy workers hiding behind the job protections afforded by the union.
What's to stop the same thing repeating itself in a game developers union?
I also worked for a construction union in the northeast, and our employer sent the worst employee's pay check to the job site via same-day courier to ensure that, once duly compensated, he could be immediately dismissed. The rest of the crew was thrilled to see him go. Construction is dangerous work, and none of us wanted him around.
At the same job, another employee, young apprentice, was found napping. He popped awake and was apologetic. Partied too hard the night before. The foreman sent him on a coffee run to get his head together. He wasn't fired, presumably because the foreman never reported him, and (at least for the rest of that job) it never happened again. Almost 20 years later, he still probably gets shit for it.
Bad employees can coast by in any job, especially hourly ones where the upper management is rarely onsite with the workforce. First dude got fired in short order despite the job protections. Second dude didn't, but (to my knowledge) not because of any union regs.
Anyway, I digress. There is, of course, nothing preventing some union horror story from taking place. There is also nothing preventing even worse labor exploitation from taking place (and we're already at 80+ hour weeks in some cases).
The biggest difference, though, is the labor market itself. The laborers in construction unions are temporary hires for a specific job. At the same time, most construction unions are craft unions with apprenticeships, where each new employee represents a risk/investment to training that person for many years. Nepotism abounds, because if you train a new hire for, say, two years, then they wash out of the program or leave to study engineering, they could have spent that time and energy training someone else.
By contrast, I would expect most gaming unions to look more like a public employees' union. It would represent permanent employees of a company, likely salaried. Not much would change in the hiring process outside contact negotiation. You get the job? Congrats, you can join the union.
The same thing that stops it from happening in Hollywood. Even the best actors and directors choose to join SAG and the DGA even though they don't need to.
In my ~6 years in the industry I don't know of a single coworker in the entire Seattle area who didn't run into a project that underwent serious crunch. Sample size of ~400 people or so.
I've also got longtime friends who broke in separately from me(and worked on some high profile stuff) in the SF/Bay area that say the exact same thing.
Pedantic note: In the 19th century textile mills and factories in general asked for 14-16 hours a day, 6 days a week [0]. In the UK, in 1831, for minors under the age of 18, daily hours were LIMITED to 12 hours a day[1].
> If employees don't like it, they're free to leave.
They're also free to bargain collectively. Why should 'freedom' mean capital consolidates and organizes as much as it likes, while labour is reduced to isolated workers making individual choices?
Its 80 years of propaganda that makes people think like this. It is to be expected, since many of these beliefs are from emotion, and not from cold business logic.
The cold business logic says to consolidate and make partnerships/business unions.
> I don't like doing this, so nobody else is allowed to do this for you either.
Unions very often prevent non-union labor and, as such, enforce their own desires on others. Don't get me wrong, sometimes that's necessary. But there are negatives involved in unions, just like there are positives.
Positives and negatives. 2 sides to the coin. The tone of your post makes it sound like you disagree with me. The argument of your post agrees with me.
Programmers are not the only ones being mistreated by gaming companies. QA testers, graphic designers, etc... cannot simply "change jobs".
It's also not as simple as "you're free to leave". Most people working in the games industry are young. Many of them do live paycheck to paycheck. In many cases they may have also moved across the country for the job. Quitting a job is in and of itself a substantial risk for many people.
There is a reason we have worker protection laws. That reason is that companies can and will abuse workers without them. This has been proven time and time again.
>Most people working in the games industry are young. Many of them do live paycheck to paycheck. In many cases they may have also moved across the country for the job. Quitting a job is in and of itself a substantial risk for many people.
They knew this industry was like this before they accepted the job. Why do we need to protect people from their own poor decisions? These aren't people who lacked opportunity and got stuck in a bad place in life and need a helping hand, these are highly privileged people who willingly signed up for mistreatment.
Excuse me? Video games are software by any definition I'm aware of and highly complex software at that. More than most, software engineers on AAA video games need to have an understanding of the full stack including the underlying hardware to be effective contributors.
What is the skill gap that a software engineer working in games would have moving elsewhere? The only one I think of would be domain experience in TDD and unit testing. Neither is widely practiced in game development, but they aren't universal for software development more generally either.
This is missing the fact that the vast majority of game developers are not "software engineers" While what you say is true for a large amount of software engineers in games. The vast majority of game developers are in Art, Design, Audio, QA, etc, where this does not apply.
I can't speak for all game development degrees, but at least for the one my university offers they don't have much focus on strong CS fundamentals, and offer more of a high level overview of programming, writing, animation, etc, especially focusing on combining these in existing game engines. People who graduate with these kinds of degrees would be employable as game developers, but wouldn't be strong software engineers. They could transition I'm sure, but it would take time to learn what they missed in university, and given the work hours expected of them in game development it seems free time for learning would be at a premium.
Even railroads and textile mills didn’t ask their employees to work 80 hour work weeks.